Top 10 Parts Of The Constitution Twisted or Ignored By The Left
10.) Article I, Section 2, Clause 3: Three-Fifths Compromise
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
America should never try to whitewash the hypocritical disgrace of slavery from our history, but neither should we lose sight of how our forefathers really viewed the institution. They knew it was incompatible with everything they believed about liberty and equality and desired its extinction.
But in a mission to tarnish the Founders’ reputation and the Constitution’s authority in modern eyes, left-wing historical revisionists present the Founders as indifferent to or supportive of slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise, which declared that slaves would only be counted as three-fifths of a whole person for purposes of apportioning House representation, is one of their key pieces of evidence.
The real story, however, is more complex. When the Constitutional Convention faced the question of how to count slave populations, it was the slaveholders who wanted slaves to be counted as full people. Why? Because doing so would give slave states more representatives, and therefore more influence in the national government, which they certainly would have used to support their interests, such as strict fugitive slave legislation and support for slavery in the territories. It was hard not to notice the hypocrisy: you want slaves to be considered people when it benefits you, but you don’t want to treat them like people?
The flip side is obvious: not counting the slaves at all would have meant far less pro-slavery influence in Congress. The debate was not an attempt to declare how human blacks were or weren’t, and the middle ground the Convention eventually settled on kept the slave states from dominance without completely alienating their support for the new Constitution. Additionally, as Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison point out, it actually created an incentive for them to abolish slavery: if their slaves became free men, their representation would rise. Also note well that the Constitution refuses to refer to slaves as anything other than “persons.” It’s not for nothing that the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass said:
In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.
Next: Distorting the Commerce Clause…
